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ENNESSEE 
CENTENNIAL 



NATHANIEL STEPHENSON. 



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THE TENNESSEE 



Centennial Exposition 




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MR. NATHANIEL, STEPHENSON 

IN THE 

CINCINNATI COMMERCIAL-TRIBUNE 
APRIL % 1897 



[Published^ by Permission] 



Nashville, Tenn. 

Brandon Printing Company 

1897 



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Gift 

Mrs. Opal L- Kunz 

Sept. 13 1934 



THE 

Tennessee Centennial Exposition 



MR. NATHANIEL STEPHENSON, IN THE CINCINNATI 
COMMERCIAL-TRIBUNE, APRIL 9, 1897. 



A CONTRAST. 

The Tennessee Centennial, at Nashville, considered as a 
spectacular effect, has one marked superiority to the late Co- 
lnmbian Exposition at Chicago. In the "White City" there 
was no sense of depth. It was all foreground. In whatever 
direction one looked there was nothing whatever but lath and 
plaster, gilt and tinsel. Nowhere could one look out beyond 
the temporary splendor of the passing show and rest one's 
imagination with a glimpse of the permanent and the historic. 
Now at Nashville things are different. Standing on the 
"Rialto," here, and facing eastward, one beholds a great white 
statue of Athene; beyond her, the replica of the Parthenon; 
and beyond that, and around about, white arches, glittering 
domes, reaches of pale-green waters, deep green stretches of 
lawn that have golden tones in the sunshine; brightness, light- 
ness; long perspectives of white wall; shadowy darkness in 
arch after arch; a world of gleam and glitter, a fascinating in- 
substantiality that has sprung suddenly out of the earth, and 
shall return whence it was digged. But this is not all. While 



6 

still standing upon the Rialto, wheel about and face eastward. 
The direction of the bridge is continued in a broad avenue 
that falls away straight in front of you amid shelving lawns 
and scattered trees. It curves to the left and disappears. The 
eye, however, still ranges on. Bright sunshine and blue sky 
overhang a wide valley, and beyond the valley there are many 
houses. Among them low-lying clouds of smoke blend hazily 
with the blue of distance and billow upward along a ridge 
crowded with buildings. Here and there a tower shoots high 
above the haze. A spire top catches the sunlight and glitters 
like a iewel. Straight in front of you, at the very center of 
the view, crowning and dominating the whole vista, veiled a 
little by gray smoke, softened by the blue of the horizon and 
backgrounded by blue of heaven, there is uplifted against the 
clouds the historic State House of Tennessee. 

The scenic value of this imaginative undertone, so to speak, 
which is possessed by the Nashville Exposition, can not be 
overestimated. No one can stand upon the Rialto, catch both 
views which it commands, and not receive a peculiar impres- 
sion that will remain with him throughout the fair. As he 
descends the slope of the Rialto, to lose himself amid the maze 
of the Exposition, the consciousness of the background of the 
picture goes with him. For that very reason the bright glitter 
of what is immediately before his eyes is all the more at- 
tractive. He knows that he has but to turn his head to catch 
again the distant presence of historic fact; the whole of this 
unsubstantial pageant, through which he moves and laughs 
and takes his ease, this world of white and gold, and green and 
blue, has heightened every gleam of color by the somber con- 
trast of that far-away veil of smoke, above which towers the 
Capitol, and within which, for them that have ears to hear, 
the cannon of the past still sound. 



A QUESTION 

It is this accompaniment played by the distant city to the 
spectacle of the fair that makes the present exhibition of such 
peculiar interest. The Tennessee Centennial, when its gates 
are opened to the world, will exhibit again the shifting varie- 
gated pageant that was seen a while back at Chicago. And 
across the wide valley the city will exhibit the antithesis. On 
the one hill, there will be the changes of light and shade that 
are due to the passing of sunshine and shadow. But across 
from it, on the other hill, there are the changes that mark the 
presence of human misery. The rolling masses of smoke eddy 
in and out among the steep slopes of the city, settle about the 
base of the Capitol, or stream up upon an idle wind and wrap 
the Capitol in grey shadow. They are the banner of the modern 
city, and the modern city is another name for woe. All through 
the pageant of the fair there will abide this double game of 
hide and seek — on the one hill, with the light of heaven; on 
the other, with the dusk of the modern struggle for existence. 
It will be hard indeed to walk through the Tennessee Centen- 
nial, with this vast duality of suggestion — for such, to the 
imaginative observer, it will be — forever ringing its changes, 
and not ask oneself continually: "To what result is all this 
pageant of American material progress going forward?" 

QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY. 

The Centennial buildings lie upon the west side of a val- 
ley that is one of the boundaries of the city of Nashville. They 
occupy, perhaps, the middle of the slope, and the summit which 
rises behind them is within the Centennial grounds. In extent 
these grounds are much smaller than were those of the Colum- 
bian Exposition. But that is nothing against them. There are 



still too many people, who have not yielded to the gospel of 
pretence, to make mere bigness a positive essential to success. 
The Centennial gains, if anything, in the absence of those im- 
mense spaces of emptiness, such as the basins at Chicago, 
which served but to dwarf the buildings surrounding them. 
This is not saying that the Centennial is better than the Chi- 
cago Fair; merely, that it has eschewed one of its predecessor's 
mistakes. 

Between the two exhibitions there is a certain degree of 
resemblance. Perhaps the truest way to put it would be to 
say that Chicago set a general style for fair architecture which 
is still in possession of the field. Here and there one gets a 
view, at Nashville, that is rather like Chicago. The view south 
from in front of the Agricultural Building has something of 
the character of the view straight out from the portico of Chi- 
cago's Art Building. In one case, at least, the Nashville archi- 
tects have followed and improved the work of Chicago. The 
Agriculture Building is a new version of the Columbian Ad- 
ministration Building. The dome, however, is much lower, it 
is set in the midst of four smaller domes, and the wings of the 
building contain four other domes. The result is a complete 
disappearance of that top-heavy effect which characterized the 
Administration Building. The Nashville design presents a 
central dome so re-enforced by its clump of smaller domes as 
to have the strength without the heaviness of a pyramid. 

SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE. 

The interior of this building, on the contrary, is one of the 
Uiings for which the designers of the Centennial have had no 
suggestion elsewhere. At present the decorations are com- 
pleted in but small part, and are somewhat obscured by scaf- 




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11 

folding. But even now one can catch a hint of unique effects 
unseen before. A sort of Tudor roof is composed of three rows 
of pendants running the whole length of the building. The 
central row is open lattice work of cotton, soft, white, downy. 
The side rows are of gray moss that hangs in air with such 
a suggestion of filmy lightness that one expects, each moment, 
to see it begin to float upward. High up in the dome there is 
a series of colossal pictures — a cotton field, a harvest ride, a 




A COTTON FIELD— AGRICULTURE BUILDING 

pasture with horses, a group of cattle — all cunningly done in 
seeds. Above these, is a striking decoration made of oats and 
sedge; and beneath, tall columns are wrapped with green cedar 
on their upper half and with yellow corn during the lower. Of 
course, such decoration is always more interesting than beauti- 
ful, but there can be few more strange and surprising effects 
than is this agricultural dome, set upon its green and yellow 
pillars and having all about it those snow-white pendants, sur- 



12 

rounded by ghostly blue-gray moss, waving slowly as if an 
army of invisible giants had suddenly been revealed to sight 
in their beards and in nothing else. 



A CITY SET ON A HII,I,. 

In the main, the Nashville Exposition is sufficiently unlike 
that of Chicago to forbid comparison. This one is essentially 




A HARVEST RIDE— AGRICULTURE BUILDING. 

a city set upon a hill. Water plays but a slight part in the 
scenic effect. Its place is taken by vegetation. Chicago, on 
sunny days, was a study in blue and white and gold; Nashville 
will be one in green and white and gold. One almost wishes 
that the hill effect could have been carried out more con- 
sistently; that the Parthenon could have stood upon the very 
summit of the hill and the other buildings descended from it 
in sweeping terraces. Such a plan would have given oppor- 



13 

tunities for the use of one of architecture's most beautiful 
features, the broad staircase. But it would also have increased 
the cost of shipment of exhibits to such a degree that, prob- 
ably, it could not be thought of. Even without this thorough- 
going application of the up-and-down suggestion, the Centen- 
nial makes distinctly an aerial effect. It is a city in air, a city 
set on a hill that can not be hid. 

NATURES PANORAMA. 

And with such a city, the atmosphere and its changes are 
a matter of first moment. Here, again, Nashville is fortunate. 
It possesses one of those rich, hazy atmospheres where every 
shadow has an inclination to look blue and the horizon is royal 
purple. On one of these days in spring, with inconstant sun- 
shine glimmering across the world, stabbing suddenly point 
after point and trailing after it a light that is soft blue-gray, 
the succession of sunshine and shadow along both slopes of 
the valley is like a panorama in a dream. 

PRISMATIC SHADOWS. 

To see the whole effect of it, go up upon the hill, behind the 
fair, late in the afternoon. The sun is low and strikes across 
the grass with that glistening brightness which is peculiar to 
the hour. The turf, in very truth, has changed to a sheet of 
emerald lit from within by invisible golden fire that you feel 
and almost see. Your shadow lies upon it in a streak of furry 
velvet. Move back until the tip of your shadow falls upon 
some spot you can locate with exactness, then pace the dis- 
tance, and you find it is twelve yards at least. 

And now, suddenly, the grass changes back from the sheet 
of emerald full of glinted sunshine to an ordinary green, dark 



14 

and lusterless. In another instant the whole foreground, with 
its cluster of great white buildings, has fallen dark. A bank of 
shadow is moving straight eastward and another bank of dark- 
ness is rising to meet it. A moment before, the Capitol stood 
out white and distinct, the crown of a mount of houses, with 
the smoke blown away or downward, but in some way gone 
from sight. Now, as the wave of shadow rolls eastward, the 
smoke ebbs back and streams up in a thin bluish veil. The 
twin towers of Vanderbilt University, away to your right hand, 
have become the register of the depth of the wave. A black 
line moves steadily up them. It engulfs the whole middle dis- 
tance and creates by contrast a momentary brightness of hazy, 
smoky splendor, just beyond it, at the base of the Capitol. A 
puff of wind sings along the valley; for one minute the smoke 
opens; the Capitol stands forth, white and bright, in the midst 
of the heavens; and then the wave overflows the towers of 
Vanderbilt, swallows up the Capitol and sweeps away into the 
east. 

But presently the Agriculture Building, far to your ex- 
treme left, lightens a little, then a little more, then suddenly 
begins to gleam and twinkle, casting back the sunshine from 
every miniature facet of its concrete. It is the one point of 
brightness in the whole vista. The other buildings of the fore- 
ground lie in cool dusk. The middle distance is a vague blue 
hollow. To the right, behind the towers of the university, the 
far bank of smoke has blended with the blue of the horizon 
into stormy purple. Straight in front, on the far edge of the 
valley, the Capitol is a lowering shadow. 

The beam of sunshine moves slowly southward. Building 
after building starts out of the clear dusk, catches the sun- 
shine at a million points, and begins to glitter like a jewel. 
Overhead the sky has become a sapphire. On the right a clump 



15 



of red brick buildings drink in the sunlight and become warmly 
lustrous. The towers of the university catch the brightness, 
and flash forth into shining distinctness against their 
banks of purple. Slowly the middle distance, the hollow of 
the valley, fills and brightens with the sunshine. At last, at 
a final bound, all of a sudden, the brightness flashes along the 
sky, cloud and smoke and dusk leap back before it, and, there, 
upon its hilltop, the mass of houses shining brightly at its feet, 
the bright blue sky at its back, is the white bulk of the Capitol. 
Of such a nature is the transformation that is forever 
going on in the landscape about the Centennial. The gamut 
of aerial colors is endless. From the intense gold-green, the 
blinding bright glare of unclouded sun, to the dusk of shadowy 
purple, when the sun has gone from sight, the sky is banked 
with cloud and the Capitol faint with distance, from the one 
to the other, there is a range of golds, greens, blues and grays 
that is as brilliant and as changeful as would be a kaleidoscope 
of prisms. 

TRANSPLANTED ART. 

But as one looks down upon all this shifting, transitory 
splendor of the changing air, one feels that he has seen it, or 
something very like it, somewhere, once before. His fancies 
go back, perhaps, to the "White City" at Chicago, and he re- 
members where he looked for its originals and where he found 
them. And then in an instant he has the clue. 

It is curious how much America has begged, borrowed or 
otherwise secured from France. The Americans have learned 
in writing/not wisely but too well, from the French novel. 
From France, four out of five American painters have 
learned-what they have learned. From Paris, the architects 



16 

of the Columbian Exposition got most of their suggestions. 
The Place du Carousal they magnified — and some of us think 
spoiled — and got the Court of Honor. The Kue de Rivoli they 
went one better of its own sort, and got the interminable 
arcades along the canals. The opera they varied in a hundred 
ways, and got all sorts of things. But the finest thing in Paris 
they never touched at all. And of just that Nashville, whether 
consciously or by mere grace of accident, has caught an echo. 
There is a hint, in this view to eastward, which reminds one of 
the shining lawns, the bright masses of building in the fore- 
ground, the distant background of towers and domes, with sun* 
shine and shadow drifting across them alternately, that are 
Paris from the Trocadero. 



ROMANCE OF LANDSCAPE. 

The Centennial, then, is merely the central point of a 
charming natural phenomenon. It has been set down in the 
midst of a bold hill country that is very nearly mountainous, 
on the edge of an historic city, surrounded by a park-like land- 
scape. A recent verse-maker has described another part of 
America in these lines: 

* * * "A shadowy nest of hills 
That are almost low-browed mountains; 

Where the breathing summer fills 
All the deep hearts of our valleys 

With a sapphire's glimmering light, 
Where a golden river glitters 

Through each blue, burnt August night." 

And those lines seem to apply equally well to the country 
that is the setting to the Tennessee Centennial. 



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But no landscape owes all its charm to the things that are 
distinguished by the eye. The things unseen, the things that 
the mind's eye alone can distinguish, are what gives the 
peculiar charm to all those places where gigantic endeavor 
has reached its predestined end. That point where the army 
of England rose suddenly from its trenches, a terrible appari- 
tion of Gothic power in the teeth of advancing France, has a 
spell for the imagination that makes Waterloo as impressive 
as the Alps. It is only when a beautiful landscape, one that 
fills the esthetic sense with its richness of form and color, it 
is only when such a landscape has this undertone of heroic 
association that the power of landscape is realized. 



ETERNAI, CAMPING-GROUNDS. 

And in the landscape about Nashville there is much to 
stimulate the imagination. It is gay enough, now, on this 
gently sloping hillside, with its camp of tinsel palaces, but 
it was not always so. The holiday crowds that will eddy 
through the Centennial will set their feet upon the very spots 
where once there trod the feet of soldiers. It is conceivable 
that some one who reads this article will lift a careless shoe 
from what, had he the eyes of the spirit, he would see was 
a bleeding footprint of the wounded. It was made long since, 
and those were cruel days, but their reality must not die. 
Both the armies which played their desperate game around 
this city have added to the honor of the American name, and 
in the heart of every American the roll of their drums endures. 
One pauses amid the turmoil of the fair to close his eyes and 
behold these hills and valleys, not as they are to-day, but as 
they were of old when the great figures of the Civil War 
thronged among them. 



20 

Well may he do so, dwelling in imagination on those 
things which he can no longer see. The shadow of that great 
war is still in all our hearts, growing larger and larger with 
time, and waiting for its historian. Some day its Carl vie will 
appear and that tragedy of the divided people which misun- 
derstood itself will unfold in gleams of lightning amid a pomp 
of drums. But the time has not come, and meantime we must 
imagine things for ourselves. Who of us has not brother or 
cousin, or father or friend, who went down in the charge of the 
guns, or reeled in his saddle when the volley crashed, or lay 
dying long hours among the wounded? And it is all over and 
the tragedy is no more, and we seek to realize the blessedness 
of the present by recalling, in solemn awe, the heroic sadness 
of the past. To-day we are where that is easy to do, and all 
the more worth doing because in the midst of a celebration 
which emphasizes, in a peculiar sense, the restored unity of 
the whole nation. 

And now, once more, go up upon the hill behind the Cen- 
tennial. Look out, again, across this smiling country, and 
bethink you of the past, of what stern things befell before the 
present could be possible. Look down upon the grounds of 
the Centennial, and as the night draws near take unto your- 
self the eyes of the spirit. At the gathering of the dusk turn 
back the hand upon the dial for five and thirty years; then 
open all the secret places of imagination. Behold the 
transformation! Where, a moment since, you saw the 
buildings of the Centennial, there is now a forest. 
Among the trees you can just make out the tents of the 
soldiers. At most times in those "Darkest Days of the Ke- 
public" the tents will be those of the Federals and the Stars 
and Stripes will be waving above the wood. But sometimes, 
the blue columns will fade away to the northward and the gal- 



21 

lant, desperate, ill-starred men in gray will take their place. 
And as this ebb and flow goes on, it will be punctuated every 
now and then by the roar of battle. There, to the south, but a 
few miles away, was fought the battle of Nashville, where 
Hood finally failed. A little farther into distance, but still not 
far away, is the battle of Franklin, of that fierce and bloody 
struggle where fate began to abandon the Confederates. Stone 
River, to the rapt watcher from the hilltop, is in plain hearing 
and the roar of its carnage still echoes across the heavens. 

This landscape is haunted, indeed, by more than the troops 
of purple shadows and lit by sterner lights than those of the 
golden sun. You have tarried too long upon the hilltop and 
as you come down into the fair the night overtakes you. The 
shadow of the hill falls heavily upon the buildings. Far away 
upon the east rim of the valley the Capitol glows a moment 
in soft rose pink, and then it also turns coldly gray. Here, 
among the buildings of the Centennial, the shadows lengthen 
and deepen, the color fades out of the water, leaving in its 
place a shimmer of steelly pallor, and the ghosts arise. 

It is the grim past drifting in a cloud of dreams athwart 
the present. In the shadow of the Parthenon there is a roll of 
drums. By the faint star shine banners may be seen flapping 
darkly in the wind. They are torn and ragged, mere tattered 
silhouettes of heroism. Along the wide curve in front of the 
Machinery Building comes a rush of hurrying feet, the sway- 
ing, rhythmic beat of a column at double quick. Its bayonets 
twinkle to the stars — a jetting torrent of spear-points — and 
above its head flap the tattered standards. The doors of the 
Auditorium burst suddenly open and out of it, as out of bar- 
racks, pours a flood of bayonets. A dozen streams of onset 
blend together and sweep southward, only to encounter an- 
other spectral host and be swept back again to the north, until 



22 

both armies are swallowed by the blackness, the standards 
merge into the shadow, the drums roll feebly far off into the 
dark and there is nothing definite bnt the starshine. The 
ghosts of all the men who have ever bivouacked upon these 
grounds have reacted in the night the struggle in which they 
died. 

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CENTENNIAL. 

And here in the midst of the battlefields, where Tennessee 
made such a valiant attempt to break from the strong bond of 
the National Union, she is now celebrating her original entry 
into that estate. A new day is dawning, not only literally as 
the visions of the night fade away, while the shadows begin 
to lift, but figuratively, in the choice of the event to which this 
Southern State asks all the world to do honor. If the darkness 
in the shadow of the Parthenon has its ghosts of war and ruin, 
the brightness that is succeeding it brings forth the white 
statue of Athene, and thus: 

"The old order changes, giving place to new. 
And God fulfills himself in many ways." 

THE NEW DAY. 

You have transformed the Centennial by your, own imag- 
ination; now go out of an early morning and watch that other 
transformation which is the sunrise. It is an early venture. 
The very latest you can risk is that moment of strange magic 
when the darkness of the night has changed impercep- 
tibly to an altogether different one, the darkness of the 
dawn. You have not yet become aware of any increase of 
light. What you have realized is a vague, uncanny feeling, as 
if things fixed and immovable were slowly drawing near you. 



23 



Large, dark shapes of buildings are stealing gradually into the 
range of vision. Great bulks of blackness take on form and 
distinctness and resolve themselves into towers, domes, porti- 
coes. Bit by bit, the very air itself is playing the same strange 
trick. The starshine is falling steadily nearer to the earth. A 
blue, never seen at any other hour of the twenty-four, glim- 
mers downward from the descending stars and makes the 
whole atmosphere one endless, starry shimmer. This is neither 







' ' ' ! -' •' •*': ' > 




STOCK FARM— AGRICULTURE BUILDING. 

night nor morning, but the most mysterious of all the hours, 
the hour before the dawn, when the ordinary conditions of life 
do not exist. You feel that you are no longer upon earth, but 
wandering about the streets of some dream city, tenanted by 
you know not what, and located in some far place unexplored 
by man. 

The buildings loom vaster and vaster as the blue shimmer 
grows steadily deeper. The dome of the Agriculture Build- 



24 

ing is crowned by the stars themselves. The tower of the 
Auditorium springs away into the very heart of heaven. The 
pillars of the Parthenon have the height of mountains. The 
Statue of Athene is some immeasurably vast creature which 
is not to be approached. 

And all these monsters of the dawn have the strange effect 
of being asleep. They are buildings no longer, they are living 
creatures wrapped in dead slumber, gazing eastward with 




A CATTLE SCENE— AGRICULTURE BUILDING. 

sightless eyes, that will be awakened by the dawn. Perhaps 
it is the continuous though imperceptible changing of the de- 
gree of distinctness in their details, due to the steadily grow- 
ing light in the heavens, that produces this uncanny effect of 
being alive. But however produced, it is there. So real is it 
that one catches one's self treading lightly for fear of waking 
these enormous creatures that are all about one. 

So far, the day has not appeared. The moment it does 



25 

appear, the instant the first yellow gleam strikes the Statue 
of Athene, the spell will be broken. One turns eastward to 
see if it be near. 

It is not there, but it is coming. The starshine does not 
extend to the eastern horizon, and the hollow of the valley be- 
tween the Centennial and the Capitol is still a great blue 
emptiness ; but beyond that, the sky has begun to change. The 
city is vaguely visible. The spires, that shoot up here and 
there, and the huge bulk of the Capitol, are softly black against 
a sky that has grown pallid, whose blue has become metallic, 
shining almost like steel. And even as one looks upon it, the 
mass of the Capitol undergoes a change. It comes swinging 
forward, or else the sky behind it gradually swings back, but 
in some way it stands forth, changing from a hard outline 
fiat against the curtain of steel blue to a mass of velvet dark- 
ness, in the midst of the shining air, with the curtain miles 
and miles behind it. The same instant an edge of crimson fire 
has crept along the east, and lies outstretched, as if the two 
wings of the morning, upon either hand of the Capitol. 

Before it is too late turn about and catch another glimpse 
of the Centennial, while it is still overspread by the mystery 
of the hour before the dawn. Already that mystery is on the 
point of flight. In another moment it will be gone. You gaze 
upon the Parthenon, and watch a cooler, clearer light that is 
thrusting crisp glimmers behind column after column, throw- 
ing out each one into sharp relief. Then comes a moment of 
pause. The mystery has departed, but the day has not yet 
come. Suddenly you are aware that something is happening 
on the facade of the Parthenon. Things are moving forward 
from behind the columns. But you catch your breath before 
you notice that they are shadows. The dawn has come so 
quietly that you have not seen it, and you give a start as you 



26 

realize that the whole facade of the temple is gleaming in soft, 
rich cream color, and the yellow light of the morning is bath- 
ing it as with showers of gold. 

THE GROUND PI,AN. 

You have seen the more striking aspects of the Centen- 
nial, and it is time for you to group them all into the effect 
that is to be final. And now, once more, as in your first impres- 
sion, you are standing on the crown of the Rialto. This bridge 
is the key point of the whole fair. Lay three horseshoes with 
their tips together, one of them measurably east and west, 
the other two not quite at right angles to that direction, and 
you have a rough suggestion of the plan of the fair, with the 
Rialto at the meeting of the tips of the shoes. The Parthenon 
stands in the middle of the east and west shoe, with its facade 
fronting square to the bridge. That, perhaps, is a mistake. If 
the Temple were seen at an angle, as the spectator crosses the 
Rialto, the effect would be even more striking than it is. But 
the planning of the fair has been dictated by the desire to mass, 
as it were, the effect of contrast between the two sides of the 
valley. An air line cuts straight through the center of this 
uiain horseshoe, through the length of the Parthenon, through 
the Statue of Athene, through the middle of the Rialto and of 
the wide Capitol avenue that leads downward to the east, 
through the site of the future Chicago Building, and across 
the valley through the center of the Capitol itself. 

THE POINT OF CUMAX. 

This crown of the Rialto is not, however, absolutely the 
finest point of view in the Centennial. To get to the point, 
which, having once found it, you will revisit time and again, 



29 

from which you will take your final and ineradicable impres- 
sion, go down the western slope of the Rialto, turn to your 
right between the Parthenon and the immense pyramid that 
is the Building of Memphis, and keep on until you are stopped 
by the Commerce Building. There, at a point midway between 
the main entrance and the north end of the building, find a 
bench or set down a campstool, and dwell in peace for the 
rest of your days at the Centennial. 

On your way to this finest spot of all you will have seen, 
again, much that is interesting. At the top of the Rialto, the 
little houses that hem you in — you have not forgotten the line, 
"Shylock's bridge with houses on it" — are cut by two arches, 
and as you look through the one to the north the graceful mass 
of the Agriculture Building fills the whole view. Advancing 
into the center of the arch, you widen the vista, other build- 
ings come into sight, and you sweep the whole of the northerly 
horseshoe. The hollow of it is water; the right tip, the large 
Negro Building, with its white walls and maroon-topped 
cupolas; the left tip, that Egyptian pyramid, four square, a 
portico on each face, which Memphis, in a sort of pun upon 
itself, has set up for its habitation. Retreating to the road- 
way of the bridge, you come down to the base of the Athene, 
and if you turn leftward you may skirt the south horseshoe, 
in whose hollow is the square-towered Auditorium, which will 
seat 6,000, and continuing westward you may pass a dozen 
other buildings before you finally get to the point in front of 
the Commerce Building, where, when the weather is fine, is 
the view par excellence. 

IONIAN SKIES. 

To your right, in a blaze of sunshine, and so placed as to 
stand forth boldly into air, is the Parthenon. To the left is 



30 

the darker mass of the Pyramid, and beside it are other build- 
ings. Directly in front is a wide space that is not at present 
broken by any building. The eye sweeps through it, past the 
shining warmth of the cream-colored columns of the Par- 
thenon, across glimmering gold-green lawns into the hollow 
of the valley; there the green merges into blue, the blue finally 
into a bank of soft-toned iridescence where rows of brick 
houses touched by the sun gleam, even at this distance, in a 
sort of faint red dusk shot with whitish blue shadows and 
above that mount of houses against a sky that is momentarily 
free from smoke and gleams and glows with the intense shin- 
ing of a color as blue as sapphire and yet as full of gold as it 
is of blue, against such a sky, in clearer whiteness than you 
have yet seen it, is the Capitol. 

But, charming as the outlook is, your eyes come back to 
a point less distant, and here, you are suddenly aware, is the 
culmination and the justification of the whole design of the 
Centennial. Wander about among the buildings of the fair 
as much as you see fit, and let your eyes go whithersoever 
they will, but in spite of you they will come back continually 
to one point. At first, the strong general effect, the two sides 
of the valley, will chain your attention, and the Capitol will 
predominate in every view. But bit by bit, the stormy modern 
element will pass over into secondary importance. The 
ingenious modern buildings, created for a day, will, bit by 
bit, take on an embarrassed expression, as of mere subjects, 
unexpectedly come to court and abashed before the Queen; 
you will feel that you are yourself of them and with them and 
as much on sufferance as they are. What is this disquieting 
sense that is creeping into you, this feeling that you are being 
weighed in the balance and found wanting? At last you per- 
ceive. You realize that there is nothing any longer upon which 



31 

you are able to fix your attention except that majestic sim- 
plicity, that sublime union of grace, dignity, power, which is 
the genius of the Greek race embodied in the Parthenon. 

THE GOLDEN AGE AGAIN. 

Greece has taken you captive; has come upon you as the 
dawn did, so quietly that you did not know it till it was done. 
This is not merely the celebration of the admission of the 
State of Tennessee into the American Union; it is, likewise, to 
you, from the moment when this gigantic contrast of National 
ideals, far vaster than the contrast you saw at first, enters 
and possesses you, it is thenceforward the celebration of the 
admission into your consciousness of the full realization of 
what Shelley meant when he wrote: 

"Greece and her foundations are 
Built below the shock of war, 
Based on the crystalline sea 
Of thought and its eternity." 

And now, when at last you haA^e realized this vaster con- 
trast, the Parthenon is like a basilisk. You can not keep your 
eyes away from it. Mere lath and plaster as you know it to 
be, it still reproduces the lines, dimensions, and, as far as we 
know, the colors of the original. The whole majestic design 
is there in all its appalling beauty. And appalling is the only 
word to express it. The sense of inferiority which grows and 
grows as one reflects more deeply upon what is the true signifi- 
cance of this combination of exquisite grace with towering 
strength, that sense is a revelation. Of course we have all 
read of this majesty of the Greek design, and we have seen 
the Parthenon upon paper, but most of us, except in an exami- 



32 



nation at college, have never thought about it until now. And 
there it stands, in the midst of the sunshine, victorious, never 
to be forgotten, in possession of our imaginations forever. 

And behind it we see the Greek nature, and we compre- 
hend its civilization. Where, there, was the show, the ostenta- 
tion, the sound and fury of the modern world? The men who 
conceived this building must have had the qualities which it 
perpetuates— sweetness, nobility, loftiness, calmness, strength. 
There was Tennyson's ideal of 

"That gentleness 
That when it weds with Manhood makes a man." 

And looking at all this, at what the Parthenon signifies 
as well as what it embodies, captivated by the matchless 
serenity of its charm, realizing its contrast to the nineteenth 
century, one asks again: "To what result is all this pageant 
of American material progress going forward?'' 

And one turns hastily away lest one look too long upon 
the unattainable and lose heart and despair of his generation. 
And yet, at least, it has set before its eyes a model without 
compare. 



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